“The diversity bureaucracy has finally swallowed an entire college”
San Diego State has clear priorities.
In a recent column at City Journal, Heather Mac Donald described the process by which diversity and social justice are eclipsing real academic pursuits in higher education:
Identity U.
The diversity bureaucracy has finally swallowed an entire college. San Diego State University has just named to its presidency a vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity, hired from the University of California, Davis. The new SDSU president, Adela de la Torre, is a peerless example of the intersection of identity politics and the ballooning student-services bureaucracy.
As vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity at UC Davis, de la Torre presided over a division made up of a whopping 28 departments—not academic departments, but bureaucratic and identity-based ones, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center; the Center for African Diaspora Student Success; the Center for Chicanx and Latinx Student Success; the Native American Academic Student Success Center; the Middle Eastern/South Asian Student Affairs Office; the Women’s Resources and Research Center; the Undocumented Student Center; Retention Initiatives; the Office of Educational Opportunity and Enrichment Services; and the Center for First-Generation Student Scholars.
This gallimaufry of identity-based fiefdoms illustrates the symbiosis between an artificially segmented, identity-obsessed student body and the campus bureaucracy: the more that students carve themselves into micro-groups claiming oppressed status, the more pretext there is for new cadres of administrators to shield them from oppression. (The causation runs in the opposite direction as well: the very existence of such identity-based bureaucracies encourages students to see themselves as belonging to separate tribes.) The admission of students who do not share the academic qualifications of their peers also creates a vast bureaucratic genre of retention services, one now taking aim at traditional pedagogy said to handicap underrepresented minorities.
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Comments
This is horrifying, on so many levels.
United we stand, divided we fall. Wow, is the left really working to divide us.
What happens when one of those people identifies as within three of those “tribes”? Whichever one will S/he join? S/he must be careful not to appropriate the incorrect identity.
Horrifying.
Not worried about the snowflakes with multiple claims of oppression…they just get bonus points.
What about the students paying for all of this crap that get absolutely nothing in return except to be told how oppressive and innately evil they are?
The creation of these identity fiefdoms is necessary to provide employment for the graduates of various racial, ethnic and gender studies programs who are otherwise unemployable (at least outside of Human Resource departments).
I read an article today where women of color paid $2,000 to attend a retreat in Costa Rica to get away from white people. Yup.
I’d wager that the “white people” were glad to be rid of her …
Academia and Soros funded activist groups can only hire so many. It is very apparent that these snowflakes cannot do math. Govt. backed student loans cannot be defaulted via bankruptcy. Let them reap what they sow.